How to Grill Pizza | Kenji's Cooking Show

hey everyone this is Kenji and we're gonna grill some pizza so I've done enough videos to show you how to make dough so I'm not going to show you how to make dough you can I'll refer back to link back to one of those videos in case you're wondering but this is just a regular old pizza dough this one is 65% hydration 3% salt 2% yeast same day dough it's been rising it Roza bulk ferment at room temperature for about about 4 hours or so and then I split it up into these 3 balls and those have been sitting at room temp for a further two hours and so for this style of pizza so this this style of Pizza grilled pizza was actually the the very first restaurant job no sorry the second restaurant job I ever had was a place in Cambridge called Cambridge one it was a grilled pizza place and there we based our technique off of the same technique that they use at Al Forno which is the restaurant that invented grilled pizza in Providence Rhode Island so there we would use we had these big rolling grates that would pull out over a bed of wood hardwood hardwood fire over hardwood fire so you like the hardwood let it burn down to coals and then there's this big great so you'll notice I'm what I'm doing is I'm rolling it out with a rolling pin so this style of pizza there's no outer crust really outer outer lip on the crust and you kind of roll it oblong and all this kind of makes it easier to handle on the grill and meanwhile what I've done is I have all my toppings ready so for grilled pizza you basically you don't really there's no heat coming from above so any kind of topping that needs to be cooked like say sausage or in this case mushrooms any kind of topping that needs to be cooked needs to be precooked because it's not going to really get much heat from above so it's not going to cook from above so what I have setup here is a two zone fire so I lit a I lit a chimney starter full of charcoal and I spread it over one half of the grill grates and the other half I left empty and that's sort of key to managing this style of pizza alright so what we're going to do now I've got some garlic oil here so this is just all I just crushed up some garlic in a mortar and pestle with a little pinch of salt added some olive oil I'm gonna take this on a brush one side of this dough put that garlic oil oh yeah did this excess oil off my board because we're not gonna want that one we're stretching out rolling out our second one mmm sprinkle with just a little salt you can also do black pepper if you'd like and then what's gonna do what I'm gonna do is gonna put it boiled side down over the coals like that now this is gonna cook fast so you got to really be careful with it okay in fact this one might be a little bit too hot right now because we definitely don't want these flames like that you see how that flame is giving it that kind of silliness so what I'm gonna do is spin the grill around oh I see why because I accidentally left a chunk of hardwood over there that was not fully combusted all right so if you see that so that's that's why I find it really nice to have this two zone fire with a pair of tongs you can easily spin the dough around like that all right so while that first side grills a little we're gonna brush the other side little bit of that garlic oil as well alright that's looking pretty good we're gonna let this those little bits that we're still not quite brown yet you want to be sort of golden I mean sort of it's sort of charred and browned all over relatively evenly and if you want to you can sort of jump like a crosshatch pattern by rotating it over the coals a little bit [Music] so I'm great okay so at the restaurant what we would do is we would grill that first side and then we'd be really ready and as soon as we put that pizza down like that we'd start topping it I find that that's a little bit difficult sometimes at home because well most home cooks are a little bit more relaxed in terms of the rate at which they want to cook things so what I find much easier is to grill both sides of the pizza broke both sides of the bread top it and then we'll you'll see what I'll do I'll put it back over the cooler side of the grill to let it finish cooking and to get all the toppings melted it's a it works much better so at at the restaurant you didn't have the advantage of a dome like a cover which we do have here which is what's going to allow us to top it and then allow this toppings to kind of heat up and melt at the restaurant I worked out what you had to do was um well basically you would spread the cheese on the bottom and then dollop the sauce on top and the heat of the the heat of the hot crust that you just flipped over would be enough to melt that cheese and the trick is you had to work really really fast which I find my experience most home cooks do not want to work as fast as that requires they want a little bit more leisure time I want a little more leisure time when I'm cooking at home too the other the other advantage that this method of working a few pieces at a time offers or topping to the side offers is that you can cook up a bunch of these bases and have them ready and then top them and stick them over on the cooler side of the grill so that you have in fact that's what I'm gonna do I'm gonna do is I'm gonna leave this one here meanwhile I'm gonna cook another ball of dough I don't know where I put my rolling pin which is why I'm using this wine bottle here alright so we got that your Ilah coil again I hate this brush I don't know where I got it but never again it was like $0.99 it and Target all right it's gonna go over the hot side and while that one's cooking I'm gonna top this guy off so I'd say let's do let's do this side up so here we're gonna put our cheese along the bottom so that it melts a little better and then I'm going to kind of do it the way like in New Jersey tomato pie is done which is where you kind of swirl the saucer on top this case the sauce is just straight up same Rosano tomatoes that I've lightly that I buzz a little bit with a hand blender all right it's like that not too heavy on anything on these ah there you go that second I was actually looking a lot nicer first one was I think a little bit slightly too hot when we got it on there which is why you see that a little bit of that charring going on Oh oops I forgot oil that second sign right here I'll finish this one more that sort of more the traditional way so this one I'm gonna cover up here we're gonna let it go into those toppings melt now this one over here I'm gonna do the way we did at the restaurant although this of course we would be doing it directly over the grill I'm so no cooldown period this is just shredded mozzarella you could use any kind of melting cheese works fontina mozzarella cheddar Jack I got this but one of the nice things about the fact that all your toppings need to be cooked is that let's use leftovers very easily so this is corn that we had left over from lunch that I grilled and just I just cut it off the cob I'm gonna do some corn there and I'll do these little sliced sliced serrano chiles and some of these fresh cherry tomatoes Wow looking good trait to me those and then let's finish it off with here's some pesto that we made from basil from the garden it's a few dollops of this year in there I'll leave half of this chili free for the I know there's not always sure if the kids want a Chile's on theirs sometimes they do sometimes they don't I think Cambridge one is still round I think actually have two locations now one the original one on Church Street in Harvard Square and I think they have one now over near Fenway Park all right let me start this last one my buddy lives over in Alameda he this is like his favorite thing to do in the backyard and he recently told me that he actually prefers doing it on a gas grill because what you can do is you can start it over high heat and then top it and then turn the burners down to low so that and close the lid so that you can leave the pizza directly in place you don't have to do that all the shuffling around once it stopped and because you turn the heat down heat down to low it melts the toppings without them without burning the crust which can which is sort of the only real the only real danger in this thing this whole endeavor it's potentially potentially burning the crust all right so we're gonna top this the way they do at Cambridge one in all four know which is with scallions you know what I'm gonna go grab some basil - okay looking great slide it over to the side and this is garlic by the way you can save it and use it as like the base for now the Olli or you can use it as a base part marinade there's no reason to get rid of all this garlic once you've depleted the oils apply in there all right and I'm just gonna run and grab some basil all right switch this guy off with a little bit of basil as well so again you know if you're having like a party or you got like you want to do thing for the kids where everyone gets to like top their own pizza what you can do is pre cook a bunch of crusts and have them ready to go and then all you got to do is top them and then you finish them off on the cool side of a grill like this with the lid on it on or off if you want doesn't really matter it'll it'll everything will melt eventually even with the lid off and that's like instant pizza party I guess not instant but quick pizza party all right this last one let's do the let's see if I still got the moves hey I do still got it all right so this is what last one was doing sort of true fashion where you gonna top it directly over the fire this is how we were able to make you know like whatever was 30 pizzas an hour per grille a pizza a minute given the with the two different grill set up what's nice is you know this is like one of the few methods where the dough actually cooks like pretty much as fast as like as a wood with a real wood fired pizza oven so you get that sort of very similar sort of a combination of chewy or as light and fluffy and crisp my fingers this is just some morels and caramelized onions with some thyme all precooked so I sauteed all that with olive oil thyme butter I'm just gonna go straight on the girl like that and let's get this guy off this one can go here let's check out got finish over there that's better scallions I think that looks pretty school pretty swell all right let me do like a party kit here which means we man you hear that Christmas headed once down the middle once down the middle this way things like that and the trick I learned actually i cambridge one was that you leave the edges uncut because people like to do this thing and pull it off like that right i'm gonna eat this hmm that's good so you see that charred crispy but tender all right all right I got a hungry family here so I'm gonna get going but grilled pizza for your next pizza party all right see you later

Channel: J. Kenji López-Alt

Views: 151,182

Rating: 4.9414349 out of 5

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Id: GkDYsQkXbxw

Length: 17min 25sec (1045 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 09 2020